


Faeshing

by plumedy



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Angst, Case Fic, Fae & Fairies, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Foxglove Summer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-20
Updated: 2016-10-25
Packaged: 2018-08-23 14:17:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8330962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plumedy/pseuds/plumedy
Summary: What it says on the tin. A fic about phishing fairies.





	1. Chapter 1

A long chain of prints stretched from the kitchen and disappeared under the library door. I squatted beside it, carefully resting the knuckles of my left hand against the marble floor for balance. The prints glistened darkly, a glaring, deliberate insult to Molly’s cleaning efforts. Each of them was about the size of a football, circular, deep copper in colour, and with a narrow vertical groove in the middle.

Someone – or something – had walked through the Folly after stepping into a pool of blood. Whatever had done that had cloven hooves. Digesting that mildly unfortunate information, I slowly lifted my head and looked at the library door.

The light streamed from under it undeterred. No sounds came from behind the solid wood. No one stood inside waiting for me to enter. The perpetrator had either fled or hidden, and I knew I should probably call Nightingale because I had no equip on me, not to mention a vest. All I had was a dirty white shirt, shorts, and a pair of decidedly non-bulletproof slippers.

I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in a few days now, and my bleary brain had some difficulty assessing the situation quickly. I cast my mind to the phone and the Airwave I could use to summon backup. They were both upstairs.

But in the kitchen behind me were Molly and Toby, and if I went to fetch my governor, they would be left alone with the thing in the library. Not that I doubted Molly’s self-defence skills, but it just seemed unfair to me.

I edged closer to the door, gathering an Impello at my fingertips. The world slowed down a little. My own breathing sounded loud and irregular to me.

But when I swung the door open, preparing to kick some serious magical ass, there was nothing inside.

Nothing was exactly what Nightingale and I discovered when he returned to the Folly, his meeting with Dr Walid cut short by my call. The prints were gone, and what was worse, the floor was dry.

“I think it might’ve been a unicorn, sir,” said I. “They were unicorn prints. Four cloven hooves, a bit like a cow’s, but much larger.”

“That is not possible.” Nightingale looked at the grey veiny marble. “No magical creature could ever enter the Folly without my knowledge. No non-magical creature, for that matter, either.”

“What is it, then?”

There was a small pause.

“I don’t know,” he admitted at last, his eyes still tracing the imaginary line below our feet. For some reason he seemed hesitant to look at me.

“We will make sense of this, Peter,” he added, a little more firmly. “But there’s not much we can do in the immediate absence of any clues.”

He made a sharp step to the left, raised his cane, and began moving it slightly, pointing the gleaming top at different parts of the ceiling. I could feel the uncomfortably powerful formae sweep past me. This was temporary protection magic – what I suppose is the magical analogue of barricading a door. Or, in Nightingale’s case, of putting a couple dozen bear traps and a crocodile moat in front of it.

“I believe Molly’s about to serve dinner,” said he, lowering the cane and surveying the invisible results of his efforts. “We can discuss this at greater length in the dining room.”

And he smiled at me suddenly, an awkward but unambiguous attempt at encouragement.

I didn’t know what to make of this behaviour. Nightingale is not the kind of guy who keeps his PCs in the dark out of some sense of intellectual superiority. And yet there was clearly something he wasn’t telling me; or, perhaps, something he wanted to tell me but didn’t quite dare. I felt a bit like I was being invited on a questionably pleasant date.

“All right, sir,” shrugged I, throwing a glance at him. He immediately turned aside – a trifle too hastily, I thought – and walked towards the dining room. The hard heels of his black oxfords clicked slightly against the pristinely clean floor.

It was shepherd’s pie for dinner, drowned in at least a litre of Worcester sauce. By probing the lake of sauce with a heavy silver spoon I was able to determine the location of the pie, take out a chunk and sample it. It was quite nice, I thought – and very hot, which was somehow comforting after the earlier incident.

Nightingale hadn’t touched his portion yet. He was sitting across the table, awkwardly far away, and his palms lay parallel to each other on the table cloth.

“Have you noticed anything otherwise unusual over the past weeks, Peter?” he asked carefully.

“Not that I can think of,” I said. “This is the first time I have seen anything unusual, at any rate.”

“You’re not sleeping well.”

“No,” admitted I, and stared at him with curiosity. “I’ve had a nasty few nights. Do you think this is somehow connected to today’s intrusion?”

“You were very nearly killed by unicorns and later forcibly abducted just under a month ago.”

“And I brought some residual fae magic with me to the Folly?”

There was a lengthy pause.

“No. I meant that you might’ve sustained some psychological damage,” said Nightingale very self-consciously. “Fairies are well known for messing with people’s heads. And you gave them your life in exchange for another’s. You believed you would never return to your own world – at least not alive. Surely this must’ve been very distressing.”

I stopped chewing the piece of lamb in my mouth and stared at him mutely. Was I really getting the “you need help” talk from Thomas “Balls of Steel” Nightingale?

“If you’re suggesting that I must’ve imagined those prints, sir-”

“I’m not ‘suggesting’ anything of the sort,” he interrupted forcefully. “You have seen that I’m not dismissing your concerns.”

I think this is a big reason we don’t normally talk about these things. Within the Job, there’s a fine line between expressing concern for another’s well-being and questioning their professional competence. The line is even finer when getting professional help would require opening up about evil spirits, black wizards, and the alternative history of WWII.

“As your immediate superior, I can give you paid leave.” He hesitated. “You’ve told me sometimes that the newly-introduced counselling services are a good thing.”

Therapy had been a thing in the Met for at least a decade at that point, but I didn’t argue.

He looked at me and I saw pained uncertainty written on his face. He didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, and yet he still tried. I felt my eyes burn.

And this is another big reason we don’t usually have heart to hearts. No one likes to break down in front of their colleagues. Especially not in front of century-old posh wizard policemen. There’s just something extra awkward in that.

Nightingale reached his gloved hand across the table and touched the back of my palm with his fingers. Here awkwardness reached critical levels, and we sat frozen, not quite knowing where to look.

I don’t know how we would’ve extricated ourselves from that situation if not for Molly. She showed up with a silver tray to collect our empty plates, and Nightingale positively jumped away from me.

“Thank you, Molly,” he said to her. His voice was a trifle off, and she gave me a worried look. Seeing that I was a mess, too, she must’ve despaired of us; she threw her small hands up a little, grabbed the tray, and stormed off.

Nightingale and I stood up hurriedly. I was desperately unsure if I could manage a palatable smile, so I opted for a formal salute instead. It was ridiculous. I decided that enough was enough and all but sprinted out of the dining room and upstairs.

Nightingale had a point, of course. I felt like rubbish. I found myself reluctant to lie down; the thought of sleep filled me with revulsion. The sheets on my bed were newly-changed and smelled with lavender; I dedicated a lot of unnecessary thought to Molly's laundry habits. Presumably she had switched over from kitchen soap to modern detergents at some point. Was she the one who chose the brand? Had she asked Nightingale to bring her samples? Or was Nightingale himself an admirer of lavender? And so forth.

Unsurprisingly, rather than keeping me awake, such thoughts had eventually lulled me to sleep.

Those dreams always started harmlessly enough. There I was, standing in the middle of a large murky meadow. Tall grasses swayed around my legs; morning dew soaked my uniform shirt, and I felt trickles of cold water running down the inside of my boots, too. I looked around. Perhaps a mile or so away, downhill from where I stood, I could see an outline of a large cottage. A few of its windows burned orange.

I sighed and started walking towards it. In my previous dreams, I had never managed to reach it; but this time, the building grew closer by the minute. I could make out more and more of its architecture, and at last I realized, with a start, exactly what it was.

I was looking at the Folly. The lighted windows were those of the library and the main hall. On the porch, right at the edge of darkness, I could see a man - he stood there, small like a toy figure, and stared worriedly in my direction.

"Inspector!" shouted I.

That quaint unsleeping house was my home, and that man was someone I loved. I knew that much.

But it was as if the reality between us was somehow distorted. The closer I walked, the harder it was to continue. The meadow turned into a steep endless hill, stretching up into the sky. The air around me crackled, odd sharp noises, like a large animal snorting. Faint light fell onto the tips of my boots, and I turned around, feeling myself break into a cold sweat.

I was staring right at an enormous unicorn. It opened its mouth a little, revealing fangs the size of my thumb, and made a low whinnying noise.

I threw a Lux at it and it swallowed the ball of light like a candy. Clearly this tactic was not going to get it off my case.

It lowered its head and swayed it lightly. Its unnaturally long and heavy horn swooshed through the air in front of me. Rather than killing me immediately, it seemed to take some pleasure in making me aware of the fact that I was in its power. I belonged to it. I had forfeited my life-

The door of my bedroom banged open. I woke up drenched in sweat - or was it dew? I was freezing cold and shaking, and my hands were cupped convulsively around a tiny ball of pale ghostly light. Half-blind and deafened by the hammering of blood in my ears, I scrambled to the edge of the bed in panic, preparing to hurl an Impello at whoever came through the door. I wasn't precisely sure what I was so afraid of. Did I expect a unicorn to somehow squeeze itself through my frankly narrow doorframe?

A deathly white hand shot out of the darkness and squeezed my wrist with the force of a garbage compactor.

"Molly," I breathed. She let out a small hiss that was, I think, supposed to be a sound of comfort. Carefully I made my light a little brighter and steadier. A familiar pair of large unnaturally dark eyes looked at me from a long pale face. I swear to god, there was no sight more reassuring or heartwarming to me then.

I struggled to sit up. Molly took me gently by the shoulders and lifted me like a kitten, settling me among the pillows and duvets heaped against the wall.

I caught my breath and looked at her cautiously.

"Did he send you?" I asked. She shook her head. She was sitting on the edge of my bed now, her bare feet hanging in the air. Something in her expression made me do a double-take.

"Wait." I inclined my head a little. "You need my help?"

Vigorous nodding. I tried to gather my thoughts and take some semblance of control over the situation.

"Okay. Can you show me what you need help with?"

Molly handed me a pair of ungodly fluffy slippers. I supposed this was as clear an answer as any, and I put them on before standing up and following her. She still held onto my wrist, and I had a vague suspicion it was because she was hazy on how to hold hands properly.

The night was warm, so my sweat-drenched PJs felt pleasantly cool against my skin. A questionable upside, I'll grant you, but at least my thought process wasn't hindered by heat.

This couldn't mean anything good. Where exactly were we going, and why on earth had Molly gone to me instead of Nightingale?

She crossed the hall and pushed the door leading into the yard. It looked like she was heading towards the coach house.

By the time we approached it, I started having my suspicions. There was only one thing in there Molly could need my assistance with, after all. But why in the middle of the night?

We walked inside and sure enough, I could see a steady cool glow. The PC was fired up. Molly walked me up to it and eloquently pointed at the screen.

No lying, I was dead curious at that point, despite the nightmares and all. I'd sort of suspected that she'd been using the computer for a while now, but to what end I had no idea. And really, could there be anything more interesting than Molly's potential browsing habits?

I sat down, hoping to god that her problem wasn't a Nigerian prince or a WinLocker.

In front of me was the Firefox "Most Visited" screen. It contained primarily recipe sites, but also a couple of news outlets, some social media links, and, surprisingly, a page that appeared to be dedicated entirely to biplanes.

Molly pointed at the Twitter icon. I clicked on it and was taken to what I supposed was Molly's account page.

"Really?" I raised my eyebrows sceptically. "Magpie_Pies?"

She gave me a reproachful look and poked at my chest with her finger. I looked at her with surprise.

"You're right," I said. "Since he and I have bird nicknames, you should have one, too. I never really thought of it this way. "Magpie"? I like this."

Molly was really quite a bit like a magpie, what with her white face, black clothes, and a collection of silverware. But I couldn't devote more thought to this idea, because she hissed impatiently and poked my shoulder.

"Alright, alright," I said hastily, and returned my attention to the screen.

4,800 tweets. Quite the number. Most of the recent ones were a part of a conversation with a certain @crystalfog.

"Are they the problem?" I asked. Molly nodded once.

I clicked "tweets and replies" and scanned the conversation carefully. Nothing about @crystalfog suggested they might be a bot or even a scammer for financial gain. They sounded like a real person all right - and a happy owner of a puppy named Wagner, if an extensive series of tweets about him was anything to go by. The tweets then touched on culinary matters, briefly discussed the best recipes of blackberry and apple pies, and went right on to discuss - fortune-telling.

That gave me pause. To be sure, I knew very well fortune-telling wasn't a thing. The laws of physics wouldn't permit for it, and whatever Nightingale might say, I was quite convinced that magic obeys the same basic laws anything else in our mortal universe does.

And yet something about the context suddenly made me incredibly suspicious.

I turned to Molly. She looked at me pleadingly and put her thin hands together in a rough approximation of someone's long head with a single horn.

"You sure?" asked I incredulously. Having recently awoken from a nightmare, I wasn't exactly being the sharpest crayon in the box. I feel now that I should've made the connection earlier. In my defence, I was not at all well familiar with the mechanics of fae magic.

Molly nodded once again and pointed at the direct messages button. I clicked on it only to reveal a single conversation with @crystalfog. It was fairly concise; after a few polite greetings and how-do-you-do's, @crystalfog offered @magpie_pies a fortune-telling session. For which purpose, as I saw when I scrolled down, they required Molly's exact date and place of birth.

I suddenly felt my blood pressure rise. It was, I was fairly certain now, someone's pretty subtle go at phishing - maybe magical phishing. And I'd seen a lot of that stuff before. I imagine everyone has those computer-illiterate aunts and uncles who can never stop getting scammed. But there was something particularly vile in this one.

Molly had come to the Folly a young girl. She had probably lost her parents; had she ever had any? There hadn't been anyone to give her the usual excessive safety warnings parents give to children. She had spent decades upon decades here alone with no one but Nightingale to keep her company. And neither of them were exactly the openly emotional sort.

And when she had sought contact with someone else, someone from the outside world, they had used her and lied to her.

"I promise we'll find a way to let you kick their sorry ass," said I, and was pleased to see her smile in a creepily predatory way. "We will need to tell him, of course."

The thought clearly made her nervous.

"It's all right," said I, "there's something we have to do first. We won't come to him with empty hands."

Now, I'm okay at IT, but I'm not some sort of Hollywood-style computer genius. Rather than utilizing bespoke complex software and hacking into @crystalfog's accounts, I set up a page with a geolocator and a video of a kitten trying to get a toy out of a jar, copied the link, and sent it to @crystalfog, accompanied by the following comment:

"Look at this cute kitty video I've found! I can't stop laughing!"

One can never underestimate the power of kitten videos. A mere half an hour later I got a response in the form of ":D :D" and a London postcode. Just as I had hoped, our scammer wasn't a Pentagon hacker, either, and hadn't even bothered to use a proxy.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know how a fic about phishing fairies became this serious.

Nightingale exited his room gloriously in his favourite double-breasted stripy pajamas. I'm not kidding, he's got a double-breasted pajamas. Okay, he'd explained to me once that it's called a "mandarin style collar" and that the other row of buttons is purely decorative, but "double-breasted pajamas" sounds much better, I think.

The fact that he hadn't taken his usual firefighter's minute to dress properly went to show how worried he was.

He produced a lux and used it to survey me and Molly closely. His grey eyes were narrowed, keen and darkened with anxiety. My misadventures with invisible unicorns had really affected him, I understood with some surprise, and a warm comforting sensation settled somewhere below my diaphragm.

"It's not what you thought, sir," I hastened to reassure him. "We've got new data."

We briefly explained our situation. Well, I did most of the explaining, and Molly provided the accompanying facial expressions. Between the two of us, I think we did palatably, considering how IT-illiterate my governor was.

He quickly accepted the information, however, and went straight to the implications.

"What they're trying to do is take back what they consider theirs," he said evenly. "Evidently their understanding is that Peter has made a deal with them that he is required to fulfil. If he cannot be taken, they will take someone from his household. That's what fairies do."

In retrospect, I don't remember being at all surprised that Molly counted as "someone from my household". I did not give any thought to it then; it just seemed natural. By then the Folly was no longer merely my workplace or a temporary accommodation; it was where I lived. Somewhere at the edge of my mind glimmered an image of a meadow and a large cottage with warm light streaming from its windows.

"So where had those prints come from?"

"As I had mentioned, they weren't proper magic. There was no one there. It is not in any outsider's power to enter the Folly this easily, through magical means or not. But it is possible to exercise some power over the people within, given that they're vulnerable." The fingers of Nightingale's left hand trembled slightly, and he quickly shoved it into his pocket. "Any resulting illusions are a side effect of that influence."

It was, I'm not going to lie, a comfort to me to hear that. Whatever I might have told Nightingale, I had doubted myself, of course. I'd seen plenty of officers crippled by PTS that'd sprang upon them seemingly out of nowhere.

"You've got a London postcode, then?" I had a fleeting suspicion that the look on Nightingale's face was a lot like how I looked when he cast a particularly powerful forma in front of me. He really had no idea what the hell I had done, and that was incredibly flattering. I wondered if I'd ever tell him about the kitten video.

"Yes, sir. It's not incredibly specific, of course, but it is something. Anything you can do with this information?"

"Yes." He was silent for a while. "And therein lies the problem."

I waited for a while. It felt a bit like the beginning of a good news-bad news joke.

"The only way to find them and have the spell stopped is to take Molly along."

Molly widened her eyes at him, opening her toothy mouth a little. Some sort of communication must've happened between them, because after a moment she nodded hesitantly and he made a slight gesture, as if drawing a curtain over something.

I think it took me longer to digest this idea. Molly in the outside world - somehow it seemed incomprehensible, an epochal shift of the same kind as the gradual return of magic to the world. Was it a good or a bad change? Who could really know?

"But surely they'd be happy if we did this, sir. That'd take her out of the range of the Folly's protection formae."

"I suspect that is what they've been gunning for all along," conceded Nightingale. "But there's little choice.

"We have the upper hand in some regards, Peter. I don't think they ever expected us to find out the London address so quickly. And it's unlikely, too, that they understand what they're getting into by trying to kidnap Molly, of all people."

I wondered how they knew about Molly at all. It was an interesting question, though not one I had any time to ponder just then.

It was almost 5am by then and the first train would soon run from the Oxford Circus station. Nightingale proposed that we take the tube, reasonably pointing out that if our opponents knew that much about us, they would probably expect us to come in one of our cars.

"And we'll take Toby," he said, unexpectedly. "Didn't you work out that he's able to sense magic? We'll need that."

I had not actually got around to compiling a chart of formae intensity (milliyaps*minute-1) or even to testing this hypothesis properly, but I decided not to mention it. It would be counterproductive to undermine my own team's confidence when we hadn't even started yet. Toby was summonned and put on a short leash. He was a little sleepy but thought this development incredibly exciting, and a moment later he was already jumping around Nightingale and Molly, his short claws clicking loudly against the floor.

Nightingale and I retreated to our rooms to change. When I came back shortly afterwards, I discovered that he had also brought some clothes for Molly, and then I understood exactly what they had been discussing in their strange self-made sign language.

Molly was dressed in a long black cloak with a large bell-shaped hood. The hood obscured her face completely. It looked like some sort of ghoulish predatory flower.

"Isn't this... a bit too noticeable?" I asked weakly.

"We won't manage to be an inconspicuous trio, anyway," Nightingale objected sensibly. "Our goal is to sabotage whatever ready-made plans they have for our arrival, not to hide our approach completely. And this will make Molly more comfortable."

I supposed this was fair enough. Still, walking through the night London beside Molly who was dressed distinctly like a Dementor was surreal. It didn't help that her free hand, the one not holding Toby's leash, clung onto my wrist like a limpet. I'm not sure even now why she chose me and not Nightingale. I'm under no illusion that she somehow liked me better; it was, I think, more that she perceived me to be _of_ the outside world.

Nightingale slapped his Oyster card on the ticket barrier to let us all through, and we descended into the dead Underground.

I like the tube. It resembles a big warm house, an enormous shelter whose one purpose is to keep you safe and comfortable while you speed towards your destination. But that very benevolent watchful presence gave me the creeps now, when we were the only people on the platform. It was like being in a cold lemon-coloured spotlight, uncomfortably exposed and conspicuous. I thought once again that the Underground should surely have its own genii locorum. Hopefully they had no sympathy for the people who were trying to harm us.

Toby seemed untroubled, though, and strolled into the first carriage of the waiting train as if Underground rides at 5am were the most natural thing in the world. Molly quickly followed him. She evidently felt more comfortable within a confined space than out on the station.

The train sighed, rocked a little, and took off along the Central line. Apart from us, there were two people in the carriage - an old guy in a blue raincoat and a homeless dude sleeping across the seats. I looked at him for a while longer than necessary to make sure he was breathing. There are not a huge number of natural deaths in the Underground - just a few dozen annually - but I guess it's a sort of professional deformation to look out for death wherever it may be present.

Our postcode was EC3R 8AH, so somewhere in the vicinity of the Monument. We got off at Cannon Street just to avoid approaching the place from the obvious direction, and walked down Lower Thames Street. Molly walked determinedly ahead of us, and Toby strained at his leash.

"It is almost like a physical trail to them," Nightingale explained quietly. "The subject of the forma forms a bond with the caster. This spell is really not a great concealment tool."

I had, admittedly, worried for Molly's safety a little; I had felt that her surroundings might confuse and upset her far too much. But now it seemed to me that the only person whose safety I should be worried about was the anonymous caster of the forma. Molly was all but flying forward, her black cloak billowing ominously like in some sort of dubious horror film. At this point she was evidently too pissed off to be afraid.

This hunch of mine was confirmed when, instead of pausing in front of the tall grey building she'd previously pointed out to us, Molly plain took the door out. We ran after her and up a considerable number of stairs - in an unfortunate turn of events, I remembered that I'd forgotten to explain elevators to her.

After seven full flights Nightingale was still doing great, but I was getting slightly out of breath. I don't know where his stamina comes from. It's not like he engages in a lot of physical confrontations, and I doubt the Met had ever actually made him pass the Cooper test.

Fortunately, we hadn't gone beyond the seventh floor. Another door crashed ahead of us with a dull thud. I ran forward and reached the flat just in time to see Molly drag some semi-clothed bloke out of bed by his right leg. Nightingale, who came in ahead of me, had already pinned his other leg to the floor with some complicated forma, and the guy was a fairly pathetic sight. I admit I experienced no pity. My assumption was that this was @crystalfog, and I felt deeply that he didn't deserve a gentler greeting.

Molly threw her hood back, got on her knees, and bent over the man, hissing with her mouth wide open. Her fangs were strikingly like a unicorn's, I noticed, stunned by the sight. Her gums were a bright, dark red. Even more interestingly, she appeared to speak - in a language like no other I ever heard; a language of angry breaths and hoarse hisses.

"All right! All right!" the man screamed. "I will do it! Christ, let go of me!"

Molly let out a hiss that sounded more like a whispered roar. I thought this must've been a swearword. Her victim only whined in response. Nightingale looked upon this with a mixture of interest and approval, showing no intention to interfere.

Molly hissed some more, now in an ominously soft way.

"I h-hereby," the man took a shaky breath and turned his head away a little, "I hereby relinquish any claims I have made upon you, and let my life be forfeit instead of yours if I break the terms of this agreement."

I guessed vaguely that this was some sort of accepted formula - perhaps even a fae analogue of a forma - that broke ownership and possession spells. Molly, at least, seemed satisfied by it, and she nodded reassuringly at me and Nightingale, though her grip on the guy's throat was no gentler for that.

"I don't think this is quite the end of it," murmured Nightingale, gripping his cane. I could feel tension radiating from him. Or was it that the floor under my feet was suddenly vibrating? I stared at it in some surprise and distinctly saw the rug move, as though the whole house under it had stirred.

Fuck, that wasn't a good sign. I was just thinking whether I should step aside or remain where I was, when an enormous crack appearead in the floor and the walls between me and Nightingale, revealing a gaping black abyss. There were seven floors worth of darkness and air below me, and concrete dust was floating down from under the tips of my shoes.

"Holy shit," I said, quite uselessly.

Something was coming for us - I could sense its overwhelming, vaguely familiar presence. The sharp scents of blood and meadow grass. Clip-clop of large hooves. A sparkling alien sky.

"You cannot take her back, Nightingale," said someone above my head. The voice was calm and deep - female, if I had to take a guess, but no human woman's. "She has never been yours to begin with."

Two realities were awkwardly merged, like pieces of an ill-fitting jigsaw. I saw a meadow full of grass going up into the sky, and a herd of large translucent unicorns. There were some people in the distance, too - or at least someone bipedal; I'm not sure it would be accurate to call them "people". And at the edge of it all, knee deep in the darkness of our world, stood a magnificent unicorn with an equally magnificent rider on its back.

Chills ran down my spine. Only now did I fully feel, for the second time in my life, what it was like when the Fairie Queen came to take her due.

"No," said Nightingale, stepping closer to the gaping crack in the floor, now just over two feet away from me, "she is not mine. Nor yours. Molly is her own and she is free to go wherever she likes. She has just proved as much."

This answer seemed to rattle the Queen more than I would've expected. She turned to Molly, who was standing over the unconscious body of our unfortunate scammer, and stretched a pale white hand towards her.

"Would you not rather come with us?" she asked a little impatiently. "How can you want to be with these strange men, locked up in that miserable place, away from anyone of your kind?"

Something was becoming obvious to me. There was something in the way Molly and the Queen's unicorn looked at each other that betrayed recognition.

Molly hissed very decisively. She looked at the Queen without fear. There were only fury and defiance in her large, inhumanly black eyes. I could swear she'd been more genuinely scared by the London Underground than by the Fairie Queen.

I felt, rather than saw, a cold, overwhelming flash of anger.

"In this case," and there were deafening metallic notes in that deep voice now, "I want him back! He has made a deal with me. Nobody can undo that!"

The next moment I knew I was being lifted into the air like a kitten. It was a bit like being lifted by Molly, only far less pleasant. What was I thinking in that moment? It is a blur; but hardly anything smarter than "fuck, fuck, holy shit, oh my god".

Then two things happened at once. Molly sprang upon the Queen and bit her hand, and Nightingale jumped over the crack and hurled something terrifying at the unicorn.

"No," I could hear him thunder, "the deal is cancelled. He is bound to me. He _is_ mine and I am his."

That was a flattering thing to hear even at the brink of death, although I am sure he was only talking about my apprentice oath.

The unicorn bolted, giving a high-pitched terrified whinny. The Queen hurled Molly across the room, her hand stained a translucent scarlet. Then there was an enormous crash, and after a moment of utter deafness and blindness I found myself sitting on the floor with my head against the wall, my ears ringing.

"Molly?" I called feebly. "Inspector?"

Someone's cold hand grabbed mine and stroked and cradled it hurriedly. I heard a soothing hiss and then a sneeze.

As well as Molly sitting beside me on the floor, I could make out Nightingale's figure now. To my great relief, he was standing upright with a large lux in his hand, evidently looking for us among the settling dust.

He finally spotted me.

"Peter," he said, in a croaky voice, and all but fell to his knees beside me. "Are you all right?"

I gave some thought to that and nodded carefully. Nothing in me was hurting. There was no obvious bleeding. A few bruises, maybe.

Without pause or warning he took me by the temples and desperately kissed me on the forehead. I don't think he was very used to doing that, because it was awkward and I think his teeth knocked against my parietal bone, but he didn't seem to mind. Surprisingly, I didn't mind, either. In fact, between this and Molly holding my hand, I felt my eyes getting wet. It was lucky we were surrounded by so much dust. Anyone would be teary-eyed with this amount concrete dust in their face, I attempted to console myself.

"I'm all right, sir," said I in a hopelessly wobbly voice.

They helped me up and together we surveyed the scene. Our unfortunate scammer was still unconscious, but there were no outer signs of injuries and his breathing was steady. I called A&E just so that they'd come and check him for concussions.

"He's just a regular fae or demi-fae, like Zach," said Nightingale. "No one particularly important, judging from his behaviour. But we'll get him for fraud just fine, if not for human trafficking.”

"Shame we can't arrest the Fairie Queen," said I.

"That would be a politically unwise move, Peter." But somehow I didn't get the impression that he disapproved of the idea that much.

We came out of the destroyed flat and walked downstairs. Toby, who had waited for us just outside the door all that time and was perfectly unharmed, wagged his tail at us furiously. I wondered if he had an inkling as to what had just happened. Surely he must have some instinctive understanding of magic?

London was waking up. A lazy blue sunrise was blossoming behind the outline of the Cheesegrater. Slowly we walked up King William Street towards the Monument station.

I turned to Molly and asked the obvious question.

“Are you a unicorn, then?”

She had her hood back on, and now it swayed slightly from side to side. A hand came out of the cloak and made an uncertain gesture that looked a lot like “fifty-fifty”.

“Not quite,” Nightingale explained on her behalf. “At least one of her biological parents belonged to that world, but Molly herself is… more unique, let’s put it like that.”

I remembered what I had known of her coming to the Folly. The first half of the twentieth century. There were many more practitioners around then, and at least some of them, I knew, took some interest in more scientific approaches.

I glanced again at the familiar pale face. Was Molly artificial? A result of some sort of dubiously ethical experiment?

Did it matter? I didn’t feel like it did.

“You could be Satan himself, Molly, and I’d still like you,” I reassured her, and she briefly lifted the hood to give me a toothy grin. _And perhaps I am_ , I read in her expression.

“We didn’t think the Queen would ever be interested in her,” said Nightingale. “But I suppose the times are changing.”

For a while he was silent. He had Toby on a leash now, and I saw the knuckles of his hand gripping the leather strip whiten.

“When I heard that she had taken you, Peter,” he said very evenly, “it was unthinkable to me. The thought that you could’ve been forever taken away from the Folly was excruciating. I don’t think I could ever- I wouldn’t-”  
“-I know, sir,” interrupted I, because listening to that was too much. I knew exactly what he’d felt. I’d felt it, too. “The Folly is our home. Neither Molly nor I are going anywhere.”

 

I slept well that night, for the first time in days. And I dreamed of a large white cottage in a meadow. It was still dark, and still the windows burned orange; and I walked towards it just like I did in every one of those dreams.

The man was still standing on the porch. Beside him was a small lean figure in a large flower-like hood.

“Inspector!” shouted I.

“Peter!” I heard a faint shout back.

I walked forward confidently, paying no heed to the tall grass and to the dew soaking my clothes. Soon, I knew, I would be home. The sky grew greyer on the horizon, and just when I set my foot on the porch, I could feel a slight drizzle start. Quickly I ran up the steps and stood beside the man and the girl in the hood. We looked at the meadow where I had come from, and the forest beyond it. Just at the tips of the tree crowns I could see delicate touches of yellow and brown.

The summer was over.


End file.
